ABSTRACT
David Hume, who is generally regarded as the most important philosopher ever to write in English, contributed to our understanding of the idea of evil on two distinct fronts. Although the problem of the relation between God and evil occupied Hume throughout his life, his most sustained, original, and influential examination of it is contained in his posthumously published masterpiece, the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. For Hume, as for his predecessors and contemporaries in the British Moralist tradition, the concept of evil has this broad sense. Hume has two different conceptions of vice, one related to his account of the natural virtues, the other to the artificial virtues. Hume paints both rationalist and Christian conceptions of good and evil with a broad brush. Hume believes that a distinctive but harmful characteristic of modern moral philosophy is that it became a handmaiden to Christianity, serving its interests.
